The Evolution of Narrative and the Self

William L. Benzon

708 Jersey Avenue
Jersey City, NJ 07302

Abstract: Narratives bring a range of disparate behavioral modes
before the conscious self. Preliterate narratives consist of a loose string
of episodes where each episode, or small group of episodes, displays a
single mode. With literacy comes the ability to construct long narratives
in which the episodes are tightly structured so as to exhibit a character's
essential nature. Complex strands of episodes are woven together into a
single narrative, with flashbacks being common. The emergence of the novel
makes it possible to depict personal growth and change. Intimacy, a private
sphere of sociality, emerges as both a mode of experience depicted within
novels and as a mode in which people read novels. The novelist constructs
a narrator to structure experience for reorganization.

O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
--Shakespeare, The Tempest , V, i.

The series of events which includes the American and French Revolutions,
the invention of the novel, the rise of modern psychology, and the triumph
of the lyric in poetry, adds up to a psychic revolution . . . a new kind
of self, a new level of mind; for what has been happening since the eighteenth
century seems more like the development of a new organ than a mere finding
of a new way to describe old experience.
--Fiedler, 1966, pp. 32-33

Consisting of a single syllable when spoken and four letters when written,
"self" is nonetheless a big word, especially when used by philosophers,
literary critics, psychoanalysts, and such--who often capitalize it, giving
us the Self. This Self is some kind of personal essence, the underlying
metaphysical being sustaining our awareness, experience, and dignity. As
such, this same Self has been under extensive attack from the deconstructive
and post-structuralist wings of contemporary thought (see, for example,
Derrida, 1970), where it is deemed an illusion, a mere contingent construct.
While I am uncomfortable with the post-structuralist style of thinking,
I accept that the Self is a construct, but that does not mean it is a "mere"
construct. Our mental life consists of constructs. As culture evolves,
more sophisticated constructs come to replace the less sophisticated. And
so it is with our selves.

One need not grapple with the arcana of deconstructive rhetoric to appreciate
the contingent nature of self. The phenomenon of split-personality displays
that contingency most dramatically. Here we see a biological individual
with several different personalities, each having different memories and
personal style. In Thigpen and Cleckley's (1957) classic study Eve had
three personalities; Schreiber's (1973) Sybil had sixteen (see also Stoller,
1973); I've heard--though not tracked down --references to individuals
with a hundred personalities. The splitting starts early in life and seems
to be along affective lines; different selves emerge to handle different
desires and emotions. In these pathological individuals it makes little
sense to talk The Self as some irreducible essence, the touchstone of personal
being. The process through which an individual constructs a coherent personal
history and a consistent inner life has been derailed.

Given such a dramatic example of personal incoherence, what is the nature
of the contrasting coherence? If we understood what consciousness is and
how it works, we might be able to define personal coherence in terms of
the range of experience available to consciousness. The individual afflicted
with split-personality can only be conscious of a limited range of experience
through each personality. There is no way such an individual can gather
the full range of his or her experience to a single arena of consciousness
and reflect on the relationships between these experiences. But then, Freud
dared to tell us that none of us can do that, that the effective causal
links between our desires and actions are often quite different from our
conscious reasons. The conscious coherence of our inner lives is often
a fabric of evasions, half-truths, and outright lies. But to write in this
way is to write around the issue.

Consciousness remains opaque. Until science--or, more accurately, science's
intellectual successor (Benzon & Hays, 1990, p. 312; Hays, 1992, p.
212)--understands it we will have to make do with such approximations as
we can manage given current knowledge. There is, however, a point which
is a bit deeper than this standard profession of modesty in the face of
current ignorance. As culture evolves, new mechanisms and structures of
personal coherence emerge. Our biology bequeaths us a complex pile of motivational
and affective machinery; but it does not bequeath us a plan for coherence.
That is up to culture to create (cf. Geertz, 1973, pp. 76, 80-81).

This essay is about the role narrative plays in helping us shape coherent
selves. Plays well acted and stories well told are zoos of consciousness
in which we place the various beasts of judgment, action and desire so
that we can observe them survive, thrive, and die. As culture evolves the
zoo's buildings and pens become more complex, the relationships between
the beasts more intricate. The first section of this essay sets forth some
basic concepts, naming a few of the beasts and analyzing a performance
by that great Elizabethan lion-tamer, William Shakespeare. I then define
the concept of cultural rank and then discuss each rank in turn, concluding
with some speculations about narrative at the current rank [1].

Following Warren McCulloch (Kilmer, McCulloch, & Blum, 1969) David
Hays and I have adopted the concept of behavioral mode as basic to motivation
and emotion (Benzon & Hays, 1988, pp. 296-298; Hays, 1992, pp. 190-193;
cf. Benzon, 1981, pp. 263-265). The idea is simple: there is a specific
pattern of brain activation appropriate to each kind of activity. Each
such pattern subserves a particular behavioral mode. Examples include feeding,
exploring, courtship, fighting, and so forth.

One aspect of personal coherence is conflict between the animalistic modes,
such as those just listed, and modes serving more abstract higher level
goals (Hays, 1992, p. 193; on high level goals see Powers, 1973, pp. 194-201).
Hays (1992, pp. 195, 209-210) has thus speculated that the four quadrants
of the cerebral cortex are concerned with achieving truth, love, beauty,
and justice, where these goals are seen as governing the internal coherence
of the nervous systems itself. An action which is appropriate to the animal
mode of, for example, fighting, might contravene an abstract goal, perhaps
love or justice. Similarly, an action satisfying an abstract goal might
well arouse a contradictory animal mode.

This kind of conflict is the familiar one of emotion vs. reason. Another
aspect of personal coherence illustrated by an experiment performed by
D. Goodwin (and reported by Fischer, 1975, p. 199). Subjects memorized
nonsense syllables while drunk. When sober their recall of the syllables
was poor. But when they were drunk, their recall dramatically improved.
It thus seems that memory is dependent on the biochemical state of the
brain. Recall of experiences is most efficient if the brain is in the same
biochemical state it was in when it underwent those experiences.

Now, there is a great deal of evidence that behavioral mode is biochemically
sensitive, that different behavioral modes are subserved by different biochemical
substrates (Kilmer et a., 1969, Benzon & Hays, 1988). This suggests
that we could have real problems of personal continuity, problems which
become obvious in the extreme cases of split personalities. If records
of personal experience are mode-specific, especially in the case of strongly
emotionally charged experience, then how can we get a coherent view of
ourselves and of our world? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry
is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed
with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple,
which was so insignificant when sexually hungry--to the point where that
apple wasn't part of the world at all--becomes a central object in the
world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself.
Regardless of the person's mode, it is still the same apple. Achieving
a continuous worldview and sense of self in the face of discontinuous experience
is not simple.

To see how these two facets--ape vs. angel, biochemical specificity--of
mode interact, consider Shakespeare's sonnet 129 (for details Benzon 1976,
1978, pp. 259-326, 1981). In the first twelve lines our attention is directed
back and forth over the follow sequence:

Desire:

Protagonist becomes consumed with sexual desire and purses the object
of that desire using whatever deceit and violence is necessary: "perjur'd,
murderous, bloody . . . not to trust" (ll. 3-4).

The poem concludes with a curious couplet, asserting that "All
this the world well knows yet none knows well,/ To shun the heaven that
leads men to this hell" (ll. 13-14). Knowing that rancid meat can
make you ill will prevent most people from eating rancid meat, but, says
this final couplet, the knowledge that sexual desire will lead you to guilt
and disgust is not powerful enough to prevent you from walking to the trap.

This cycle is easily explained using the concept of mode. Moral strictures
governing honest and honorable behavior are encoded in neural structures
most strongly active in a certain, no doubt cortical, mode. However, as
sexual desire grows, the biochemical state of the brain changes and mode
shifts; moral strictures are no longer readily called to mind; anything
goes. Once desire is satisfied the brain can return to a mode in which
morality is regnant. When morality sees what has just been done, morality
is outraged. We can further speculate, as outrage grows, another biochemical
change occurs, inducing a modal shift, and we are no longer in a cortical
mode conducive to reason and morality. In giving way to outrage, morality
has undermined itself. In such a mind, reason hasn't a chance. Such is
the conflict between ape and angel, between the subcortical structures
of the limbic system and the cortex.

In this context the apparently gloomy admission of the concluding couplet,
which holds the preceding twelve lines in view and asserts that you can't
escape, has a paradoxical restorative effect [2].
Intuitively, I'm absolutely sure that it works this way. Explaining how
it works is another matter. Hays (1992, p. 196) suggests a deep connection
between sociality and expressive culture. Taking that as our cue, we can
see that the final couplet restores a sense of sociality. The horror and
shame of the first twelve lines resides, not only in the violence, but
in the destruction of social mutuality; the lusty animal is "not to
trust" (l. 4) and "Mad in pursuit and possession so" (l.
9). The final couplet begins with the admission that "All this the
world well knows" (l. 13) and, in so affirming, restores the lusty
and despised animal to society. We are all like this; we know it; we can't
escape. Thus the shame, guilt, and anxiety which is evoked in the first
twelve lines is assuaged and order is restored (for an earlier, and more
recondite, version of this argument see Benzon 1976, pp. 975-976, 980).
To use Hays's terms, the relationship between the final couplet and the
first twelve lines satisfies the cortical desire for beauty and that satisfaction
triggers an epiphany which "fixes" the entire experience in one's
nervous system and brings about a bit of psychological reorganization.
Over the long term the cumulative effect of such epiphanic reorganizations
is to bring greater internal coherence to the nervous system, making subcortical
ape and cortical angel more comfortable, one with the other.

Let's conclude this section by taking a closer look at mode. In Hays's
terms, the process of creating and understand such a sophisticated poem
would be regulated by the right rear quadrant of the neocortex. The mode
is adventure and the goal is beauty. What is being made beautiful is the
relationship between the sound of sonnet 129, which we've not discussed,
and it's sense, which we have. The sound involves matters of rhythm, rhyme,
and meter and may also directly encode the emotion-bearing essentic forms
discussed by Manfred Clynes (1977, see also Fonagy, 1971, 1976; for a more
detailed discussion see Benzon, 1978). The sense, as we've seen, involves
a stroll through the primitive modes of sexual courtship, sexual action,
and disgust. Unlike the person in the process of living these experiences,
the poet and readers are not deeply into any of these primitive modes.
These modes are only weakly invoked, or perhaps only cortical residuals
of these modes are evoked, while in the right rear adventure mode. The
person actually living those lusty experiences cannot see the vicious causal
connection between them, their consciousness consumed, in turn, by those
primitive modes. I speculate that the poet, and reader, can endure the
anxiety aroused by the partial arousal of the conflicted primitive modes
at the heart of the sonnet's sense because of the pleasure in beauty achieved,
the satisfaction of the cortical adventure mode, is offset against. We
endure the anxiety because we know that beauty is coming. Through that
beauty poet and reader can see and contemplate the vicious causal connection
among the modes of the lust cycle. Thus the poem provides a vehicle in
which those modes can cohere in consciousness.

This is a very complex expressive achievement, with centuries of cultural
evolution behind it. The initial achievements of expressive culture are
less sophisticated. But they are the foundations on which Shakespeare's
achievement rests, and that achievement is, in turn, foundation for still
more sophisticated vessels of expressive consciousness.

I originally proposed the concept of cultural rank (Benzon 1978, 150-219)
in a discussion of narrative. In subsequent discussions David Hays and
I have deepened the original concept (Benzon & Hays, 1990) and applied
it in different arenas (Benzon, forthcoming; Hays, 1991, 1992). Rank 1
culture is that of preliterate societies. With the emergence of literacy,
Rank 2 culture emerges. Catalyzed by mathematical knowledge arriving from
the Moslem world, Rank 3 culture appeared in Europe in the Renaissance.
Rank 4 culture began in a number of spheres at the beginning of this century,
and is now typified, in part, by the computer and its effects. Cultures
of higher rank are more diverse and complex than those of lower rank. Nothing
in the theory sets any limits on the number of possible ranks or requires
that culture evolve toward any particular goal. In particular, not only
do we not assume that current Western culture is the point of the
entire process, we are quite convinced that Western culture cannot meet
our emotional needs and must therefore be transcended. The final section
of this essay addresses this challenge.

The trickster is a ubiquitous figure in world mythologies and his trials
and tribulations include obvious modal issues. I want to consider the Winnebago
trickster cycle as presented by Paul Radin (1956). The trickster cycle
has many episodes and not all episodes are told in each telling, nor are
all episodes present in all cultural groups. Indeed, Radin asserts that
the trickster

is admittedly the oldest of all figures in American Indian mythology, probably
in all mythologies. It is not accidental that he is so frequently connected
with what was regarded in all American Indian cosmologies as the oldest
of all natural phenomena, rock and sun. Thus he was a figure that could
not be forgotten, one that had to be recognized by all aboriginal theological
systematizers. [1956: 164]

Among the Winnebago the trickster stories are sacred, with trickster being
presented as the giver of culture. The story can be narrated only by those
who have a right to do so, and only under the proper conditions.

The basic action of the story is simple. Trickster, the tribal chief, is
preparing for war. This preparation violates tribal tradition, for the
tribal chief is not permitted to go to war. While there is no explicit
retribution for this, no character who says something like, "Because
you have failed to observe the proper rituals, you are going to be punished,"
the preparations fail and Trickster ends up in the wilderness, completely
stripped of culture. He then undergoes a series of adventures in which,
in effect, he learns how to operate his body and his culture. These episodes
are a catalog of behavioral modes, with hunger and sexuality being prominent.
For example, there is one incident (Episodes 12, 13, and 14) where Trickster
learns that his anus is part of his body. He had killed some ducks and
started roasting them overnight. When he went to sleep, he instructed his
anus to ward off any intruders. Some foxes came and his anus did the best
it could, but the foxes ignored the flatulence and ate the ducks anyhow.
So, to punish his anus he burns it with a piece of burning wood. Naturally
he feels pain. Only then does he realize that his anus is a part of himself.

In another Episode (number 15) Trickster learns about erections:

On Trickster proceeded. As he walked along, he came to a lovely piece of
land. There he sat down and soon fell asleep. After a while he woke up
and found himself lying on his back without a blanket. He looked up above
him and saw to his astonishment something floating there. "Aha, aha!
The chiefs have unfurled their banner! The people must be having a great
feast for this is always the case when the chief's banner is unfurled."
With this he sat up and then first realized that his blanket was gone.
It was his blanket he saw floating up above. His penis had become stiff
and the blanket had been forced up. "That's always happening to me,"
he said. "My younger brother, you will loose the blanket, so bring
it back." Thus he spoke to his penis. Then he took hold of it and,
as he handled it, it got softer and the blanket finally fell down. Then
he coiled up his penis and put it in a box. And only when he came to the
end of his penis did he find his blanket. The box with the penis he carried
on his back.

Notice that trickster's penis is, at this point, quite long, and that he
carries it in a box. These things will change later on. In Episode 38 Trickster
hears a voice taunting him about the way he is carrying his genitals in
a box. Trickster discovers that the voice is coming from a hollow tree.
He probes the tree with his penis, trying to reach the source of the voice,
but to no avail. Finally he withdraws his penis and finds that all but
a small piece is gone. In the next episode (39) Trickster kicks the log
to pieces and discovers the chipmunk who'd been doing all this mischief.
Trickster takes the pieces of his penis and makes things of use to humans
including potatoes, turnips, artichokes, ground-beans, and rice. Finally,
Trickster leaves the box behind and goes on with his penis now appropriately
attached to his body.

Then there is the incident (Episodes 23, 24, 25) in which Trickster hears
plant bulbs asserting that anyone who eats them will defecate. Trickster
wonders "Why does this person talk in such a fashion?" and, when
he finally spots the bulbs, promptly eats one, fully confident that he
will not defecate. He is, of course, proven wrong. At first he only breaks
wind, gradually, and then building up to the point where he is being tossed
into the air. Still, this is not defecation. But then defecation starts,
gradually at first, but building up to the point where Trickster's excrement
covered the ground to the top the tree Trickster had climbed. He fell off
and got lost running around in his excrement, bumping into tree after tree
until he finally found a body of water and jumped in, finally escaping
from his excrement.

All of these episodes clearly involve mode-specific behavior, in particular,
the bathroom and bedroom modes as Hays calls them. But why are such incidents
included in the sacred stories of the Winnebago (and many other peoples)?
Because those modes are a part of life and must be situated in the total
pattern of human experience, a pattern ultimately governed by cortical
requirements. The genes do not provide such a pattern and so culture must
make up the lack (cf. Geertz, 1973, pp. 76, 80-81).

However, Rank 1 stories are not simply about mode. Recall the episode (39)
where Trickster recovered the pieces of his stolen penis and used them
to create various foodstuffs. The point is not directly a modal one; it
is conceptual, indicating a metaphorical likeness between the male organ
of generation and the foodstuffs needed to sustain human life. Whether
or not this episode also establish some connection between the modes of
copulation and eating/digestion, and thus make some contribution to subjective
coherence, is a question we can leave to anthropological psychoanalysts.
The direct conceptual connection is obvious, and its mechanism, metaphor,
is the mechanism of Rank 1 abstract thought (Benzon & Hays, 1987, 1990).
Much of what happens in Rank 1 stories is metaphorical, and those mechanisms
have been studied by Levi-Strauss (in e.g. 1969). As metaphor is surely
regulated by cortical mechanisms (cf. Jakobson, 1971, Pribram, 1971, pp.
358-359) such episodes display the more purely cognitive/cortical aspect
of Rank 1 story-telling. Some of the episodes are built around animal modes,
others around cortical modes.

This observation suggests a way of thinking about whole cycle, which is
very loosely plotted. We don't have things happening in early episodes
which are then picked up later and developed. There are coherent sequences
of 3 or 4 episodes (out of 49), but there are no causal links spanning
long sets of episodes. The story is thus just one thing after another;
its coherence is thus quite loose. To recite the Trickster story the teller
enters into story-mode and starts with the initial episode. Each episode
or set of episodes is governed by some modal concern, whether animal or
cortical--with our knowledge of neuropsychology, we may know that cortical
modes are higher than animal, but Rank 1 narrative mechanisms make no such
distinction. When a mode's story has been told, that mode terminates and
another mode becomes active and is rendered into language. This continues
until the repertoire of modes is exhausted--or the story-teller and/or
audience is exhausted. Overall, the cycle has no theme to exhibit, no moral
to be drawn. It simply is. Note however, that neither the teller nor the
audience actually enters into the modes which Trickster displays--they
don't get hungry when he does, nor do they break wind on cue. More likely,
as indicated above in the discussion of Shakespeare's sonnet, the depicted
modes are only partially activated. The story is thus a vehicle which brings
a wide variety of modes to consciousness for those in the assembled band
so that they can affirm their collective humanity.

Before concluding this section I want to step back a bit and distinguish
between the mechanisms of behavior and some representation of those mechanisms
constructed in the cortex, the self-image (Luria, 1973, Benzon & Hays,
1988). For example, Piaget (1976) tells of young children explaining that
they crawl by moving their arms, and then their legs, which is physically
impossible. Children will give this explanation even while crawling, which
is done by moving first one pair of diagonally opposed limbs, and then
the other pair. After about seven the children give a correct account of
crawling. Regardless of explanation, these children have in fact been crawling
since their first year. The plan which actually executes the crawl is fine.
But the verbal account is obviously not a direct read-out of that plan
(cf. Nisbett & Wilson, 1977, Guidano & Liotti, 1983, pp. 131 ff.).
The verbal account is presumably based on a cortical representation derived
from observation of one's own behavior, the behavior of others, and, of
course, whatever one is taught to think about such matters.

The works of expressive culture are the chief means by which cortical representation
of motivation and affect is constructed. There is no reason to expect that
such representation will be particularly accurate. The trick comes, of
course, from the fact that the cortex is not an external agent. The cortex,
and all the representations stored therein, is part of the mechanism of
behavior. The simplified and imperfect representations of a person's own
behavior thus form part of the mechanism by which that behavior is regulated
and made coherent. The fact that the cortical angel has only a crude understanding
of the subcortical ape is no doubt part of the conflict between them.

Thus, regardless of the real complexity of behavioral control, the Rank
1 narrator proceeds as though the modal system had only one level; the
stories run though one mode after another. That is what Rank 1 cultures
can understand of human behavior. To the extent that such stories are the
means by which people gain inner coherence, it is clear that the modal
repertoire of Rank 1 adult will be loosely organized (see Hays 1992, pp.
196-198). Such a life is governed by modal impulse; call it the Freudian
id.

But as culture evolves and expressive means grow in sophistication and
complexity, the cortical representation of behavior will become more sophisticated,
its contribution to behavioral regulation more effective, and the sense
of self more coherent.

The epic narratives of Rank 2 cultures have a more complex structure
than Rank 1 myths and tales. Typically the epic will open in the middle
of a sequence of events, in medias res , and recall events from
the past as needed to explain and justify current actions. Innocent and
obvious as it may seem, the mere ability to tell events out of order is
significant for it implies a more sophisticated control structure than
that required to tell Rank 1 stories. In the terms introduced by the Russian
Formalist literary critics (see e.g. Shklovsky, 1965), in Rank 1 narratives
the plot takes its structure directly from the story . In
these terms "story" refers to the episodes being narrated while
"plot" refers to the order those episodes are introduced into
the narrative.

Before moving to a specific example, let's look at this matter in more
detail. A considerable amount of psychological research and speculation
suggests that we have an episodic memory which stores events in sequence
(see, e.g. Tulving, 1972; Kintsch, 1974, pp. 73-102; Hays, 1981, pp. 50-56).
To relate a sequence of episodes one simply: 1) starts with an initial
episode, translates it into speech, and then 2) moves on to the next episode,
and then 3) moves to the next, and so on, translating each episode into
speech until the last is reached. Relating episodes out of order, however,
is more complex. For example, if one wants to speak the episodes in the
order second, third, first, fourth, and fifth, one can't simply start at
the beginning of the chain and step through the episodes in order. Rather,
one has to:

skip over the 1st episode, leaving behind a marker A;

then take two episodes in order;

set a marker B in the chain;

return to marker A to pick up the 1st episode;

return to marker B, thus allowing you to skip over the second and third
episodes this time; and

take the last two episodes in order.

This is clearly a more complex operation than stepping through episodes
in order. One has to keep track of the episodes in the story and of the
plotting of those episodes (for some technical machinery, see Benzon 1978).
Those markers, A and B, are variables which refer to episodes. As
such they are part of a metalanguage which is about episodic structure.
Simple narration doesn't require such metalanguage variables [3].

Rank 2 creators and consumers of epic have this more sophisticated control
structure available. And they use it, not simply for pleasure in virtuoso
manipulation of materials, but to achieve coherence not otherwise obtainable.
Let's work our way toward Homer [4] with some observations on the nature
of epic form from Scholes and Kellogg account of The Nature of Narrative
(1966: 208 - 210). They begin by observing that the plots of epic

are episodic, and present the deeds (or gestes ) of a hero in some
chronological sequence, possible beginning with his birth, probably ending
with his death. . . . In Beowulf . . . the episodes are reduced
to two major ones, the latter including the hero's death. In the Iliad
, we are down to a single episode developed at length, with neither the
hero's birth nor death included in the timespan of the action . . . We
can see in Homer a movement away from the traditional epic narration of
the deeds of the hero. . . . The notion of starting a story with a plunge
in medias res . . . does not merely mean to Homer . . . starting
in the middle and then filling in both ends of the hero's life. . . . The
deeds of Achilles, or the life of Achilles, or even the death of Achilles
are not the subject of this narrative. The plot of the Iliad focuses
on one episode in the hero's life, just as his characterization on one
element of his psyche; and the subject is the same in both--anger.

I want to refocus that just a little. What the narrative is about is Achilles'
character--the warrior's character, which it reveals to be a character
dominated by anger. A few centuries later Plato's Republic would
articulate a theory of the state in which three classes of citizen are
considered: rulers, soldiers, laborers. These are ideal types; each has
a particular character, an essence. We can think of this essence as a modal
disposition. The warrior needs to be comfortable with these modes, the
ruler with those, and the laborer with still a different set.

It is one thing to say that "Achilles is a warrior." It is quite
another matter illustrate this anger through deeds and actions. This distinction
is familiar to students of fiction as the contrast between telling and
showing (Booth, 1961, pp. 3-19). In a more general context Hays
and I talk of indication and conveyance (Benzon & Hays,
1987) where indication corresponds to showing (via deeds and actions) and
conveyance corresponds to telling (making an explicit verbal statement).
The job of Homeric narrative was to indicate the essence of such an ideal
type by telling the appropriate stories in a coherent order. Plato's philosophy
conveyed that essence. Returning to the Iliad , Homer concentrates
on one incident in Achilles' life, his pursuit of honor when his concubine
was taken from him by Agamemnon. This incident and its consequences provide
the threads of cause and purpose which extend from the beginning, through
the middle, to the end of the narrative, giving it a coherence lacking
in tellings of the trickster stories. In the course of laying those threads
Homer weaves many digressions into the narrative fabric. Some of those
digressions tell us about earlier incidents in Achilles's life, some about
the Trojan war in general, and others about other incidents from Greek
lore. By focusing on episodes in Achilles' life which don't encompass his
birth and death in chronological order, Homer is able to insert a wedge
between the events of Achilles' life and his style of meeting those events.
Since all of the events of the story are not given in chronological order
that order cannot be the main source of narrative coherence. It is Achilles'
wrath which is at the center of that coherence, and that wrath is a matter
of his character. Precisely because we cannot comfortably assimilate the
events one after another we are forced to think about the temporal framework
and distinguish it from the characters within it. In this matter the Odyssey
--which interweaves three narrative strands, one centered on Odysseus,
one on his wife Penelope, and one on his son Telemachus--is a an even more
radical departure from preliterate narrative modes than is the Iliad.

There is another aspect to Homer's digressive narrative strategy. As Norman
Austin points out (1986), many of those digressions are paradigmatic examples
providing past precedent for current attitudes and actions. Thus, when
Nestor rises to give counsel early in Book 1 he digresses:

Yes, and I my time I have dealt with better men than
you are, and never once did they disregard me. Never
yet have I seen nor shall see again such men as these were,
men like Peirithoös, and Dryas, shepherd of the people,
Kaineus and Exadios, the godlike Polyphemos,
of Theseus, Aigeus's son, in the likeness of the immortals.
These were the strongest of the generation of earth-born mortals,
the strongest, and they fought against the strongest, the beast men
living within the mountains, and terribly they destroyed them.
I was of the company of these men, coming from Pylos,
a long way from a distant land, since they had summoned me.
And I fought single-handed, yet against such men no one
of the mortals now alive upon earth could do battle. And also
these listened to the counsels I gave and heeded my bidding.
[Book 1, ll. 260-273]

The point is clear, with credentials, with precedents, like these, Nestor
is a man to be taken seriously. Many of the digressions on Homeric epic
are like this. They bring the full range of Greek mythology and history
to bear on the events currently in narration.

Handling this kind of narrative complexity requires more sophisticated
cognitive equipment than that required for Rank 1 narrative. Homer couldn't
simply start at the beginning of a sequence of episodes and move through
to the end. Rather, he had to be able to treat one episodic sequence as
the main sequence and then interweave other episodes into the narrative
according to any of a variety of criteria. He used plot to regulate
various strands of story . The effect of this strategy is to foreground
Achilles' character against the background of the events which are told
in the epic and which follow from that character (cf. Scholes & Kellogg
1966: 209 - 210). The resulting narrative structure also exhibits large-scale
symmetries and parallelisms in its arrangement of episodes which you don't
find in the less sophisticated story cycles of Rank 1 (Whitman, 1986).
We end up with one grand metaphor in which the main incidents of the Iliad
form the vehicle, the supporting and background incidents are the tenor,
and Achilles' character, the warrior spirit, is the ground [5]--note that
in epics as rich as Homer's most of the main characters, not just the central
figure, receive such treatment. To be sure, Achilles isn't quite Shakespeare'
s Hamlet or Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, but we see more of his character
than is typical in myths or folktales, where there is no characterization
to speak of. Characters in Rank 1 stories may be brave or sneaky or patient,
but the stories don't reveal that to us in any depth or subtlety.

Sophocles' drama about Oedipus the King (c. 425 B.C.) is more recent
than the Homeric epics (c. 850 B.C.) and is more sophisticated--that is,
it is higher within Rank 2 [6]. As the play opens Oedipus is king of a
Thebes beset by a terrible plague. Crucial episodes from the past, including
the events central to the tragic action, Oedipus' parricide and subsequent
marriage to his mother, are given in flashback. Many of the central episodes
in the play involve inquiry and revelation; they are mental acts. And Oedipus
the King is the drama of a man's coming to knowledge of the past events
which define his place in the world without his having had any conscious
participation in those events. This is quite different from the episodes
in Homeric epic, where things happen--men are killed or wounded, monsters
evaded, seas traversed. In Oedipus the King , events become known
and Oedipus and his circle suffer the consequences of that knowledge. The
play takes place in a mental realm that barely existed in Homer's time.

This is important. Over two decades ago Julian Jaynes (1967) published
a quixotic and provocative book in which he argued that consciousness originated
in Greece sometime between Homer and and Athenian Golden Age. He notes
that Iliad and Odyssey : 1) contain many episodes in which
humans receive direction from gods and goddesses, and 2) do not contain
many words referring to mental states and actions. He takes the first observation
at face value and concludes that the Homeric Greeks (and others as well)
heard inner voices and acted on what they heard. He combines the second
observation with the fact that such mental words were common by the time
of the Athenian Golden Age and concludes that, by that time, consciousness
had been invented. The inner voices were no longer necessary as their function
was subsumed by this new consciousness: that is, the creation of concepts
about mental states and acts gave rise to consciousness.

However skeptical I am about aspects of Jaynes's theory--for example, I
bizarre the thought that Sophocles was conscious while Homer was not--
something very important clearly happened in that period. For the purposes
of this essay, the important observation is that mental terms were scarce
in Homeric times, but not in Sophoclean (and later) times. If one has no
mental terms, one can hardly attribute anything to the mind. And Sophocles'
Oedipus the King would not have been possible in Homer's time precisely
because it is a play which takes place in a mental realm. It is about mental
"stuff" and its major acts are acts of knowing or denial.

In this mental arena, question of responsibility is central. Is Oedipus
responsible for killing his father and marrying his mother when he did
not know that the man he killed was his father, or that the woman he married
was his mother? The answer seems to be "Yes, ignorance of who these
people were is no excuse." The fact that Oedipus put his own eyes
out suggests that he does take responsibility for his actions--that is,
to preserve his dignity, he must take such responsibility and remove himself
from society.

For tragedy is about the preservation of dignity in the face of inescapable
shame. As Thomas McFarland (1966, pp. 114-115) notes: "In the great
Shakespearean plays the protagonist always has the choice either of accepting
a death that defines his life at its highest level, or of avoiding death
and descending to a lower level of life." It involves an assertion
of the value of human reason in the face of the impossibility being fully
reasonable. The tragic death also affirms communal norms in the face of
gross violation of those norms. For the tragic hero is a scapegoat, a sacrificial
victim who cleanses the community by metaphorically dissolving its transgressions
in his/her (self) destruction (Girard, 1972, pp. 68-88). To permit the
tragic hero to live would be to sanction intolerable behavior.

But drama is not life, it is expressive culture. The audience identifies
with and sympathizes with the protagonist (and, in secondary ways, with
the other characters as well). All know that Oedipus did not know what
he was doing and feel that there is something that is wrong in thus punishing
him. Punishment is demanded so that the claims of sociality and the cortical
goal of justice are satisfied. By satisfying the these goals against the
claims of sympathy the tragedy foregrounds that goal . To the extent
that the protagonist embodies and acts out forbidden impulses which are
similar to our own, that identification arouses those impulses within us.
When the hero is banished or dies, the force, the biochemical energy, of
those impulses is transmuted (a psychoanalyst might say sublimated) into
affirmation of sociality and the cortical goal of justice. Thus the tragic
catharsis serves to strengthen our cortical defenses against the forbidden
subcortical impulses (Hays, 1992, pp. 201, 203). But let us return to Homer's
world--for Oedipus' blinding, banishment from Thebes, and miraculous death
in the grove at Colonus (depicted in Oedipus at Colonus ), are relatively
late additions to the story. Those events were unknown to Homer, whose
Oedipus died at Thebes where he was given the funeral games appropriate
to a monarch (Kirk 1974: 164). These particular events--Oedipus' blinding,
banishment, and miraculous death--are demanded by the development of Rank
2 conceptualizations which took place between the time Homer's songs were
first written down and the time when Sophocles wrote his Theban cycle.
Human character had become restructured so that the full tragic experience
became possible.

Between Homer's time and Sophocles', the superego had become firmly established
in the Greek psyche (this draws on conversations I have had with David
Hays). This is certainly consistent with Julian Jaynes's account of the
evolution of mind and gets a little help from Freud's comment that "The
super-ego of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual"
(Freud, 1930/1962, p. 88). The Freudian superego is essentially a homunculus
in the head, an agent of self-discipline watching over perceptions and
actions, permitting some while blocking others and meting out rewards and
punishments as necessary. The superego is what is gratified by, nurtured
by, and, in a measure, created by the strategies of affective and cognitive
coherence employed in Rank 2 expressive works.

Whereas Rank 1 expressive mechanisms treated all modes as being on the
same level, Rank 2 mechanisms are able to differentiate between subcortical
and cortical modes. The resulting expressive works yield a richer and more
sophisticated account of the connections between desires, actions, and
feelings. Personal coherence increases and inner lives become more stable.

Rather than moving directly to an examination of the novel, the premier
Rank 3 narrative form, I want to begin by considering Shakespeare. His
reputation is the very highest and, however much one grants to a need to
believe in Great Men, deservedly so. More than any other individual writer,
he laid the foundation for Rank 3 story telling. In particular, he created
a group of plays at the end of his career which provide the expressive
cradle for a new sense of marriage and family life.

However, I also have a more didactic motive. It is all well and good to
talk of literary evolution and to demonstrate one type of structure at
one point in time, and a different type at a later point. It would be even
better to show how a particular story is told at one time and then becomes
modified at a later telling. In this case we can look at what remains the
same, and what changes, attributing the changes to evolution. We had a
taste of this in the difference between Homers's and Sophocles' Oedipus,
but we can do much better with Shakespeare, for almost all of his plays
are based on stories which survive in several earlier versions. So, I want
to begin with the story of Hamlet, dealing with the difference between
a medieval treatment of the story and Shakespeare's proto-modern account.
Then I want to consider one of his late plays and follow its plots and
themes into the Rank 3 novel.

We begin with Hamlet. While Shakespeare's version is the one we
know best, the story is considerably older. The version in the late twelfth
century Historica Danica of Saxo Grammaticus (reprinted in Hoy,
1963, pp. 123-131) is different from Shakespeare's. The cultural level
is low Rank 2 or, perhaps high Rank 1--the Dark Ages really were dark and
not until the twelfth century did Europe manage to work its way back to
Rank 2. Amleth--for that is how Saxo named him--faced the same requirement
Hamlet did, to avenge his father's death. His difficulty stems from the
fact that the probable murderer, and therefore the object of Amleth's revenge,
is his uncle, and thus from the same kin group. Medieval Norse society
had legal provisions for handling murder between kin groups; the offended
group could seek the death of a member of the offending group or ask for
the payment of wergild and a public apology. But there were no provisions
for dealing with murder within the kin group (Bloch, 1961, pp. 125-130;
cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1974, p. 226). Thus Amleth faced a situation in which
there was no socially sanctioned way for him to act. In fact his
situation was a less extreme version of the problem faced by Orestes in
its most extreme form--how to exact vengeance on one relative for the murder
of another relative. Both men are bound to avenge the death of their father;
and both are similarly bound to the person they must kill. Amleth exacts
vengeance against an uncle, whereas Orestes exacts it against his mother.
Amleth deals with his problem by feigning madness. Being mad, he is not
bound by social convention, a social convention which binds him both to
his murdered father and the father's murderer. Amleth's madness allows
him to act, which he does directly and successfully. He kills his uncle,
the usurper, and his entire court and takes over the throne.

Shakespeare's Hamlet was not so fortunate. He is notorious for his inability
to act. When he finally does so, he ends up dead. And whether his madness
was real or feigned is never really clear. What happened between the late
twelfth century version of the story and the turn-of-the-seventeenth century
version? The change might, of course, be due merely to the personal difference
between Saxo Grammaticus and William Shakespeare. However, European culture
and society had changed considerably in that interval and thus to attribute
much of the difference between the two stories to the general change in
culture is not unreasonable. Saxo Grammaticus told a story to please his
twelfth century audience and Shakespeare told one to please his audience
of the seventeenth century.

Something had happened which made Amleth's madness ploy less effective.
An individual can escape contradictory social demands by opting out of
society. But if the contradictory demands are within the individual, if
they are intrapsychic, then stepping outside of society won't help. If
anything, it makes matters worse by leaving the individual completely at
the mercy of his/her inner contradictions, with no contravening forces
from others. That, crude as it is, seems to me the difference between Amleth
and Hamlet. For Amleth, the problem was how to negotiate contradictory
demands on him made by external social forces. For Hamlet, the contradictory
demands were largely internal, making the pretense of madness but a step
toward becoming, in reality, mad.

The difference between the story of Amleth and Shakespeare's Hamlet
parallels the difference between the Oedipus story as it was in Homer's
time and as it came to be in Sophocles. Just as the superego evolved between
thirteenth century Greece and fifth century Greece, so it had to be recreated
between twelfth century Denmark and seventeenth century England. The Elizabethan
audience demanded defense against their dark impulses while the Medieval
audience settled for some slight of hand which let the impulses work toward
a happy ending.

Magnificent as he is, Hamlet is not Shakespeare's greatest tragic creation:
that honor goes to Lear. But Shakespeare's dramatic career did not end
with his great tragedies. He had more to say, and in a distinctly different,
and more modern, mode. In the course of his career Shakespeare worked in
four dramatic genres, comedy, history, tragedy, and romance [7].
During his thirties--we know little of his life before then--he worked
on comedies (A Midsummers-Night's Dream , Twelfth Night ,
Much Ado About Nothing , etc.) and histories (Richard III
, Henry IV, Part 1 , etc.). Then his interest shifted to tragedies
(King Lear , Othello , Macbeth , etc.). His last major
plays--Cymbaline , Pericles , The Winter's Tale ,
The Tempest -- combine elements of tragedy and comedy and so are
sometimes called tragi-comedies; but the term "romance" is quite
common and that is what I shall call them.

Shakespearean romances contain a pattern which subsequently shows up in
various novels, not because the novelists were consciously or unconsciously
imitating Shakespeare, but because he had, at the highest reach of his
art, created a pattern which became routine at Rank 3. In all these romances
there is a conflict in one generation (the tragic component) which isn't
resolved until a marriage in the succeeding generation (the comedic component).
This basic pattern is most clearly exhibited in The Winter's Tale
. A pattern quite similar to Shakespeare's occurs, somewhat modified, in
several novels, including Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, George
Eliot's Adam Bede, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I want to compare
The Winter's Tale with Pride and Prejudice and thereby gauge the significance
of the novel, the literary genre which arose as Europe moved to Rank 3
culture [8].

Both works are plotted in two phases. In the first phase the protagonist
misunderstands the actions and attitudes of others and brings about disaster.
Shakespeare's Leontes has banished his wife Hermione, his oldest friend
Polixenes, left his infant daughter Perdita to die, and has lost his son
and heir. He has also learned, from an oracle, that it was all a mistake--his
wife was not having an affair with his best friend. Austen's Elizabeth
Bennet has just turned down a marriage proposal from one Fitzwilliam Darcy,
a most eligible, but haughty, bachelor. Her sister Jane has been abandoned
by Darcy's friend Bingley--Bingley's sister and Darcy connived to bring
this about. Where we had seen the possibility of two marriages, now we
see nothing.

In the second phase the estrangements of the first phase are reconciled
around a marriage between characters closely associated with the protagonists.
In the romance, Perdita didn't die, rather she was raised by a shepherd
and courted by prince Florizel, the son of Polixenes. With Leontes' recovery
of his daughter and the prospect of her marriage reconciling him with Polixenes,
Leontes is recovering from his sixteen-year depression. In the final scene
the gathered court sees a statue of Hermione unveiled and, as Leontes remarks
on how life-like it appears, the statue miraculously does come to life
(Hermione had been in hiding). Husband and wife are restored to one another
and to their daughter. In Pride and Prejudice Darcy and Elizabeth
rethink their attitudes. Darcy encourages Bingley to resume courting Jane.
Lydia, a younger sister, runs off with one Wickham, whose charm hides a
reckless and dishonest nature. Darcy intercedes to bring about a marriage
between them, thus preserving the Bennet family honor. As the novel ends,
Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bingley are engaged, and Lydia and Wickham
are married.

In both works we are asked to identify with protagonists who initially
misjudge those around them. Their misjudgements, at least in part, were
of the sort that can lead to the psychoanalytic couch. Leontes was delusional
and Elizabeth, while not psychotic, was making judgments which went beyond
the evidence; such judgments necessarily reflected her impulses. The feelings
astir at the harsh ending of the first phase are the legacy of those projectively
mistaken judgments. As we (the audience or readers) continue, we invest
those feelings in the reconsideration which the focal characters undergo.
That reconsideration induces us to the reorganization which Hays (1992)
puts at the center of Rank 3 expressive culture. Those feelings are given
new form. To further understand this reorganization we need to consider
the role played by the associated marriage in the second phase.

The associated marriage forces the protagonists' attention away from their
own problems. And it brings our attention to bear on the need for family
integrity. But the family in question is the Rank 3 intimate family, not
the medieval lineage, which was essentially a public vehicle for organizing
social, political, and economic power (cf. Stone, 1977). Children assume
a focal role in this intimate family (cf. Aries, 1962) to have importance
independently of any economic value their labor might have or the political
value to be gained by arranging marriages with other kin groups. In Shakespeare's
case, the family depicted is medieval in kind, but, I'm suggesting, the
psychological impact is that of the intimate family. In Austen's case,
we are fully into the Rank 3 world. What happens around the associated
marriage is that the focal characters establish a basis for intimacy.

Interpersonal intimacy, in the sense we understand it today, is a Rank
3 affective creation (Stone, 1977, pp. 325-404; Rybczynski, 1986, pp. 4-75).
We glimpse it in John Milton's 1644 discussion of Doctrine and Discipline
of Divorce (see Hughes 1957, p. 703), in which he asserts that

God in the first ordaining of marriage taught us to what end he did
it, in words expressly implying the apt and cheerful conversation of man
with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of solitary life,
not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but
a secondary end in dignity.

This conception was not commonplace in Milton's time, much less in Shakespeare's,
but it was common in Austen's--and, I might add, in Austen's novels a character
is judged by the quality of his or her conversation. By overcoming their
pride and prejudice, Darcy and Elizabeth establish a basis for intimacy.
But Shakespeare's romances laid the basis for this intimacy. And intimacy
allows the self to grow beyond the shame of tragic hubris. Intimacy establishes
a private sphere for sociality where individuals can talk about matters
which may be forbidden in public or, if not forbidden, are nonetheless
problematic for a given individual. We are so much creatures of language
that for us, if it hasn't been, or can't be talked about, then it doesn't
exist. Intimate conversation allows for acceptance and, through acceptance,
growth (cf. Hays, 1973); it enlarges the sphere of subjective experience
which can be rendered in speech and thereby enlarges the bounds of personal
reality [9].

In Rank 2 society reputation and honor are paramount. When those are destroyed,
the individual has no ground on which to affirm him or herself. With the
emergence of intimacy and inwardness, the self is not so dependent on honor.
Honor still matters, but one does have one's intimates. What cannot be
born in public may be born with them.

If we turn from the similarities to the differences we can get some sense
of the distance traversed from Shakespeare to Austen. In the play the tragic
phase involves a rift in an extant marriage. There is a legal bond which
is difficult to break; Leontes could not simply walk away from Hermione.
When they are reconciled they are only fulfilling an extant legal bond.
In the novel it is courtship which is interrupted; Elizabeth and Darcy
are free to part. And conversely, when Elizabeth and Darcy finally do come
together, they do so freely. This suggests a shift from externally enforced
actions to actions generated from within. Elizabeth and Darcy have a greater
range of feeling and action under their control than do Hermione and Leontes.

There is, however, a more critical difference; this concerns the way in
which the characters reconsider their situation. We never actually see
Leontes (or Hermione for that matter) come to accept that situation and
then grow beyond it. Rather, Shakespeare gives us a sixteen-year hiatus
between the third and fourth act, with the Leontes' growth happening in
that interval. The novel is quite different. We see Elizabeth question
her attitudes and motives--and Darcy as well, though less directly. Thus
one can open Pride and Prejudice almost at random and find passages
such as:

It was not often that she [Elizabeth] could turn her eyes on Mr. Darcy
himself; but, whenever she did catch a glimpse, she saw an expression of
general complaisance, and in all that he said, she heard an accent so far
removed from hauteur or disdain of his companions, as convinced her that
the improvement of manners which she had yesterday witnessed, however temporary
its existence might improve, had at least outlived one day. When she saw
him thus seeking the acquaintance, and courting the good opinion of people,
with whom any intercourse a few months ago would have been a disgrace .
. . the change was so great, and struck so forcibly on her mind, that she
could hardly restrain her astonishment from being visible. [Chapter II
of Vol. 3]

This occurs when Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle happened to visit
Pemberley, the Darcy family home, as, well, tourists, and Darcy himself
shows up, to Elizabeth's initial chagrin. There is nothing particularly
remarkable about this passage; and that is the point. It is not remarkable;
it is typical. Elizabeth's change of heart is documented leisurely and
in great detail. Where Shakespeare gives us only the Before and After,
Austen gives us the growth of Becoming [10].

This growth, in effect, shows an imaginary person, call him/her an actor,
change from one character-type, set of modal dispositions, to another.
The Rank 2 actor has only one character; for that character is an essence
and it is in the nature of essences that each individual have only one
of them. The essence of a Rank 3 actor is not thus fixed. That essence
can change; or, if you, the essence of a Rank 3 actor is no longer defined
in terms of a single set of modal dispositions. The actor's essence has
now become the capacity for movement in an abstract "space" of
modal dispositions. Rather than being a single data point, it has become
a vector [11].

The access to thoughts and feelings which allows Jane Austen to show her
characters growing from one set of modal dispositions to another is the
very stuff of the novel. If the characters in the novel are fish, then
thoughts and feelings are the water in which they swim. The novel is the
major literary genre which emerged with the evolution of Rank 3 European
culture (for a reliable history, see Watt, 1957). Of this general evolution
Leslie Fiedler (1966, p. 32-33) has said it was "the invention of
a new kind of self, a new level of mind; for what has been happening since
the eighteenth century seems more like the development of a new organ than
the mere finding of a new way to describe old experience." The novel
assumes inwardness and a sense of privacy, attitudes which emerged with
the Rank 3 middle class (cf. Rybczynski, 1986). Myth, epic, and drama are
all public; the stories are told, or enacted, in public. One reads novels
silently, alone, and in the physical comfort of a favored chair--thus encouraging
a muscular relaxation which undoubtedly contributes to the psychological
effect.

In the novel, the narrator becomes part of the writer's expressive apparatus.
Plays have no narrators and for the epic, myth, and folktale, the narrator
is the teller of the tale. But the Rank 3 novelist is not to be identified
with his or her narrator. The narrator is a creature of the fiction [12].

Narrators may be omniscient or restricted in their knowledge about events
in the story, they can be a character in the story or someone outside the
story, they can even be unreliable (on modes of narration see e.g. Booth,
1961). Some narrators may address the reader directly and ask for sympathy,
though most do not. What all narrators do is manipulate our access to the
story so that there is always distance between us and the characters, with
whom we identify. This distance provides the basis, I might even say cradle,
for psychological reorganization, which is the hallmark of Rank 3 expressive
work (Hays, 1992). If we take psychoanalysis as a paradigm for reorganization,
comfortable couch and all, then the narrator is the analyst, providing
both the setting in which forbidden impulses can be expressed and the guidance
needed to reorganize those impulses into a more coherent personality structure.

Finally, if we associate Rank 1 with the id, and Rank 2 with the superego,
are we thus bound to link Rank 3 to the ego? That is more problematic.
It is the ego's job to determine what's real. This is a job for the neocortex,
which does so from humankind's inception and evolves ever more sophisticated
means of constructing that crucial distinction. There is a purely cognitive
aspect to this problem which has to do with determining whether or not,
for example, the deer are north or south of camp, which metallic alloy
will hold the sharpest edge, or whether or not there is a ninth planet.
To the extent that such tasks are in the ego's domain--as the ego psychology
wing of psychoanalysis maintains--that ego is basic to human nature. That
type of reality maintenance is different, however, from determining whether
or not, for example, the deer is your guardian spirit, your spouse's infidelity
is real or imagined, or if passionate love is real or mere fiction--the
problem Gustave Flaubert set for Emma Bovary. This type of reality maintenance
is more to the point of this essay and, in this function, I'm willing to
speculate that the ego is a Rank 3 psychological construct [13].

For all its sophistication, however, the coherence of the Rank 3 self
has been bought at the price of considerable emotional repression. This
coherence makes it possible for us to create large complex social organizations
affording a high degree of security for large numbers of people. But emotional
dissatisfaction runs high. And so Rank 3 expressive culture began to break
down at the turn of the twentieth century, yielding modernism in all sectors.

Some twentieth century narratives, like twentieth some century music, are
so dense and complex that only a specialist could love them and then, one
fears, primarily because they are fertile territory for scholarly exegesis--James
Joyce's Finnigan's Wake and John Barth's Letters are the
first examples which come to mind. Some writers adopt the computer, as
controlling metaphor (Porush, 1985). Many narratives abandon the realism
which dominated the nineteenth century novel. From the stream of Virginia
Woolf's consciousness and Kafka's paranoid fantasies though the magical
realism of contemporary Latin American authors (e.g. One Hundred Years
of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez) to such very different
North Americans as William Kennedy (Ironweed ) and Toni Morrison
(Beloved ), dreams and reverie shape the fabric of depicted reality.
Other kinds of mixing blur the lines between fictional and non-fictional
genres. The ficciones of Jorge Luis Borges partake of philosophical
essay, mystical meditation, and short story. Norman Mailer (e.g. Armies
of the Night ), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood ) and others use
novelistic devices to report journalistic tales. E. L. Doctrow has historical
characters play major roles in purely fictional happenings in Ragtime
and Billy Bathgate . Donald Barthleme has blended anything with
everything in an astonishing range of short pieces; Thomas Pynchon has
done the equivalent in a few long narratives of spectacular depth and breadth.
Other writers-- e.g. Timothy Mo, Frank Chin, Amy Tan, V.S. Naipaul, Wole
Soyinka--articulate their concerns from a limbo between Western and non-Western
culture.

It is not obvious to me that any of this is fully Rank 4 narrative, though
much of it is profound and moving. Rather, as I have argued in the case
of music (Benzon, forthcoming), we have a rich and roiling evolutionary
soup from which new expressive devices can, in time, emerge. Whatever inhabits
the cultural equivalent of the gene pool is frisky indeed. But friskiness
is only a necessary condition; it is not sufficient.
I do not really know where serious literature is going. Some friends, however,
have made comments I find suggestive. One friend, Janet Hays, has suggested
that adults, men and women, need to learn how to enact a female role in
some situations, a male role in others. I believe her suggestion is aiming
beyond recognizing and acknowledging characterological androgyny--that
individuals of either sex have both male and female tendencies--to asserting
the need for psychological and social mechanisms regulating and supporting
switching back and forth from one type of role to the other. When a woman
dons a business suit she would thereby undergo a transformation similar
to that which occurs in phone booths for Clark Kent. A man would undergo
a similar transformation upon donning a housedress or, at least, a Mr.
Rogers cardigan.

Another friend, Druis Knowles, asserts that African-Americans are bicultural,
acting according to one set of norms among themselves and according to
different norms when among European-Americans. Sidestepping the question
of just what "culture" means in "bicultural," Knowles's
assertion seems similar in kind to Hays's suggestion. Both are alluding
to a fairly high-level organization of personal resources, allowing one
to function efficiently in diverse contexts which differ from one another
in deep and extensive ways.

Most of us undergo some behavioral shifts as we move from one context to
another; sociologists discuss such matters under the rubrics of role and
status (see articles in Graburn, 1971, pp. 289-321). Whether these standard
concepts are adequate to my purpose, however, is not at all clear to me.
I know that, as a musician, I seem to adopt one mode of being when performing
jazz and another when performing classical music. This difference seems
to me different in kind from the difference between showing up at the office
and writing technical manuals and discussing my malfunctioning refrigerator
with a repair worker. The repair worker and my co-workers belong to the
same culture. I'm not at all sure that jazz and classical music do--not
at their deepest levels. These two cultures happen to coexist in the same
society; but that coexistence is not a happy one however culturally fruitful
it has been.

Another observation from my own experience seems germane. Back in my days
as a university faculty member, I noticed that I was not in a really good
research frame of mind until three or four weeks after the Spring semester
had ended--my brain had to have one set of modes to handle the academic
routine of teaching and committee work and another set for intense thinking.
Transition from one set of modes to the other took time [14].

Extended vacations may well afford a similar change in modal organization.
One takes a month off from work and spend two months on safari in Africa;
then boards a small sailing boat and island-hops in the Caribbean for a
week, and concludes with a climb up El Capitan. With all that time away
from work, the mind changes and we enter different modes of experience.
Reading travel books, or novels, even the best, is quite different to go
there. Physically restructuring the mind requires time and a steady regime
of different sensations, desires, and acts. That "willing suspension
of disbelief for the moment" (Coleridge, 1817, p. 6) through which
the Rank 3 reader transports him/herself to another world is but a transition
between currently available modes. What happens after days and weeks of
exploration has a different quality.

What has to happen so that it doesn't take weeks to get there?--rather,
you step through the door and, in a manner of seconds, or minutes at the
most, you are in a different world. Back in the 1960s, many of the best
and brightest of a generation of Rank 3 Americans sought to make this quick
leap with hallucinogenic drugs. Now a new generation projects the same
desires into a polysensory and hyperkinetic cyberspace conjured up through
virtual reality technology (Porush, 1993). Neither the chemical nor the
electronic technology is directly to the point. The chemical technology
carries grave risk. The electronic technology has yet to display long-term
dangers, but we do not know what to do with it. If we knew what to do,
we could realize suitable expressions in any available medium, electronic
or otherwise.

In this situation we can only explore, as our ancestors before us, and
theirs before them, have done. With passion, trust, attention to craft,
and an intellect nourished and strengthened by love, we may emerge in a
twenty-first century both brave and new. Avanti!

1. In the following analyses I focus entirely on the
content of literary works, what happens and who does it, and say nothing
about the linguistic medium in which they are constructed. This is certainly
a weakness for, as I argued in my account of musical evolution, the manipulation
of the physical medium is central to expressive works (Benzon, forthcoming).
Those inclined to correct this weakness could begin with stylistics (see
e.g. Sebeok, 1960, Chatman, 1971). See also footnote 10 below.

Note also that in standard literary usage plays and narratives are different
genres. Were I concerned with just how these expressive works are enacted,
then my casual mixing of plays (e.g. Oedipus the King ) and narratives
(e.g. Iliad ) would be problematic--for the difference between listening
to one performer recite or sing a tale and watching a company of actors
mount a play is surely a significant difference. However, in this essay
I'm concerned primarily with the story which is told, not how it is told.
For this purpose it is convenient to call my example works narratives regardless
of whether, in a more correct literary sense, a work some kind of narrative
or some kind of play.

2. We may usefully compare the logic of Shakespeare's
poem to that of substance abuse, and its therapy. The lust cycle, as Shakespeare
presents it, seems typical of addictive behavior. And the sonnet's final
admission is much like the first of the twelve steps in the Alcoholics
Anonymous therapeutic regime--an admission that one is powerless against
alcohol. In an essay on the cybernetics of the self Gregory Bateson (1972,
p, 309) argues that this admission "provides a partial and subjective
short cut to a more correct state of mind".

3. Werner (1973, p. 203) reports a similar inflexibility
in remembering songs. And there is some anecdotal evidence that this temporal
inflexibility isn't confined to imaginary narratives, that it obtains when
Rank 1 people recount incidents from their lives. In his classic study
of memory F.C. Bartlett (1932/1967, pp. 264-265) tells of a problem sometimes
faced by colonial administrators when Rank 1 people were asked to testify
in court. The examiner may have been interested in an incident which happened
in mid-day, but the witness will tell his or her story starting with the
day's beginning. When the examiner interrupts and asks the witness to move
directly to the incident of interest the witness will become confused and
lost and have to start from the beginning.

4. The Trojan War, if it happened at all, occurred
in the period of the twelfth to fourteenth century B.C. while Homer most
likely lived in the ninth century B.C. (Lattimore, 1951, pp. 18-20). The
texts of Iliad and Odyssey bear all the marks of oral composition
(Lord, 1960)--that is to say, they originated in an oral culture and employed
the compositional methods typical of oral epic. Exactly how they came to
be written down we do not know; "Homer" is just a name to which
we can attach little biographical fact. Their richness and complexity,
however, argue against the notion that they are, in effect, written transcripts
of oral performances. Indeed, Lord (p. 149) notes that dictated texts--with
the narrator telling, or singing, the tale while a scribe writes it down--are
longer and "technically better" than actual performances. The
process of dictation thus changes the nature of the resulting narrative.
The Homeric texts, while built from oral materials, achieved a level of
coherence and organization possible only through writing.

5. "Tenor", "vehicle", and "ground"
are standard terms introduced into the literary study of metaphor by I.A.
Richards (1936). In "Achilles is a lion in battle" "lion"
is the vehicle, the item to which the tenor, "Achilles", is compared.
The ground is the similarity which justifies the metaphor. In this case
the similarity is no doubt in the fighting style.

6. In our published work on cultural rank, Hays and
I have focused on the job of differentiating one rank from another. That
leaves the unfortunate impression that all within a rank is of a piece.
That is obviously not so and we have had extensive discussions about progress
within a rank, to little conclusive effect. Chronology tells us that Sophocles
came after Homer and analysis of their work tells us about what has changed.
But it is difficult to go beyond that to a more abstract and general account
of cultural progress within a rank. Does it proceed continuously or in
stages? If in stages, how many, what are they? In either case, what's the
mechanism? For now all we can say is that there is progression within each
stage and all analysis must recognize that.

7. For the basic biographic facts of Shakespeare's
life, of which we have so few that finding the real Shakespeare--Sir Walter
Raleigh and Queen Bess herself have been favored candidates--has been a
minor scholarly sport for a century, see Bentley (1961, a chronology of
the plays is on pp. 230-231).

8. For the benefit of those who aren't familiar with
these works and who want a better sense of what they contain than they
can infer from the main text, I offer the following summaries:

The Winter's Tale:
King Leontes of Sicilia is visited by his good friend king Polixenes of
Bohemia. Leontes observes his wife Hermione conversing with Polixenes and
mistakenly assumes a romantic liaison. Hermione gives birth to a daughter,
Perdita. Leontes banishes his wife and Polixenes and orders Perdita to
be left on a desert island to die. His young son, Mamillius, dies, leaving
him without an heir. Then he learns from an oracle that his suspicions
were unfounded. He is crushed. Meanwhile, Hermione's friend and aid, Paulina,
has hidden her. Neither Hermione and Leontes know that Perdita was found
by a Bohemian shepherd. So ends the first, the tragic, phase of the play.

The second, comic, phase opens after Leontes has spent the sixteen years
in gloom, not knowing that his wife is still alive and that his daughter
is safe. At long last he is ready to come back to life, even perhaps to
marry again. Meanwhile, Polixenes's son, Florizel, sees and successfully
woos Perdita. Knowing that his father wouldn't permit him to marry a peasant,
Florizel takes Perdita and flees to Sicilia, with Polixenes following.
Leontes receives the young couple and manages to figure out that Perdita
is his daughter. Overjoyed, he sanctions their marriage and is reconciled
to his old friend Polixenes. Hermione comes out of hiding and all are amazed
and happy.

Pride and Prejudice:
The Bennet family, husband, wife, and five daughters in need of husbands,
learns that Netherfield Park is to be leased by one Mr. Bingley, a most
eligible bachelor. Bingley brings with him a friend, Mr. Darcy, who is
even more eligible, but also proud and haughty (note, though these men
do have first names, they aren't used much in the book). Bingley and Jane,
the oldest daughter, are attracted and there are rumors of marriage. Darcy
and Elizabeth, the second daughter, are also attracted; but their attraction
is cloaked in apparent disinterest and verbal jousting. Others see the
attraction but Elizabeth and Darcy don't know what's in their hearts. Unexpectedly,
Bingley leaves Netherfield Park, leaving Jane behind with her marriage
hopes dashed. Halfway through the novel, in Chapter XI of Volume II (of
three), Darcy proposes marriage to Elizabeth after declaring that, against
his will and judgment, and across the social gulf between them, he found
himself in love with Elizabeth. She is surprised, shocked and turns him
down. That ends the first phase of the novel.

In the second phase of the novel Elizabeth and Darcy spend much time re-evaluating
their experience. Much of our attention shifts to Lydia, one of Elizabeth's
younger sisters, and her relationship with one Wickham, a dashing young
officer who is a rogue to the core. Wickham is the son of an esteemed retainer
of the Darcy family and was destined for preference until he proved profligate,
eventually seducing Georgianna Darcy, Darcy's younger sister. That despicable
act completed his fall from familial favor. When Darcy learned that Wickham
had run off with Elizabeth's younger sister Lydia, he secretly intervened
and brought about their marriage, thus legitimizing the liaison and saving
the Bennet family honor--Lydia herself was quite pleased, Wickham less
so. This generous act convinced Elizabeth that Darcy wasn't so bad after
all. As the novel ends, not only are Elizabeth and Darcy reconciled, but
Jane and Bingley too. Three of Mrs. Bennet's five daughters have found
husbands.

9. My point is thus a variation on Wittgenstein's
(1953) famous arguments about private language. He was concerned to show
that no language can be the private creation of a single individual; that
language is inherently intersubjective. My point is that once experience
has been rendered into language, and thereby shared with another, that
experience gains a measure of reality. [Editor's Note: See also Karl Popper,
Objective Knowledge , New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, for
more on language and the objectification of internal experience.--PL]

10. In his farewell play, The Tempest , Shakespeare
structured his story to avoid the stark contrast between Before and After.
This play begins with After, as the protagonist, Prospero causes a shipwreck
which brings his old enemies to him and a bridegroom to his daughter. We
are told about the conflicted past, Before, in flashback. The present action
of the play is devoted entirely to engineering the marriage which will
allow Prospero to become reconciled to his old mates and return home.

For what it's worth The Tempest has been popular with Hollywood.
The 1956 science fiction classic The Forbidden Planet was based
on it [Editor's Note: and the original "Star Trek" television
series in turn derives in part from The Forbidden Planet --PL],
and Paul Mazursky attempted a more conventional update in 1982, retaining
the original name. The most interesting transplantation, however, is Robert
Zemeckis superb Who Framed Roger Rabbit . There is no reason whatever
to believe that Zemeckis had Shakespeare in mind, he was actually working
from a novel. But, in the way that Pride and Prejudice bears the
impress of The Winter's Tale , Who Framed Roger Rabbit bears
the impress of The Tempest . In Hays's (1992) terms, Roger Rabbit
is a work of entertainment, a Rank 2 expressive work created by Rank 3
people for broad consumption in their society.

Despite the film's name, the protagonist is a depressed alcoholic private
detective named Eddie Valiant. His quest to restore his old buddy Roger
to Jessica parallels Prospero's quest to secure a husband for his daughter
Miranda. Just as the process of wedding Miranda to Ferdinand reconciles
Prospero to his past, so too does Eddie become so transformed in his search
for Roger that he rekindles his love for Delores. The power battle which
drove Prospero from his dukedom is mirrored by the murder of Eddie's brother,
which drove him away from Delores and toward alcohol. The magic which is
the milieu of Prospero's island is mirrored in the gags and physical improbabilities
of the Toons and their cartoon world.

As I said, I'm not arguing that Zemeckis was trying to remake The Tempest
, or was even influenced by Shakespeare. I am saying that our inner lives
are so much the children of his expressive works that his plots and themes
turn up of their own accord.

11. In a privately circulated essay with the ungainly
title of "Male, Female, and the Shape of Shakespeare's Career"
I have, in effect, charted Shakespeare's own growth through such an abstract
space. Focusing on a Much Ado About Nothing , a comedy, Othello
, a tragedy, and The Winter's Tale , a romance--the order in which
they were written--I show that there are consistent changes in the way
Shakespeare's sets up the dramatic action in these plays. All begin with
a man who mistakenly believes the woman he loves to be unfaithful. In the
comedy the mistake occurs during courtship; in the tragedy it occurs shortly
after marriage; and in the romance, the mistake occurs well into the marriage.
If we examine the relationships between the characters, we find that it
gets closer as we move from one play to the next. Consider the following
table:

MUCH ADO

OTHELLO

WINTER'S TALE

Protagonist

Claudio

Othello

Leontes

Mentor

Don Pedro

Deceiver

Don John

Iago

Paramour

Borachio

Cassio

Polixenes

Beloved

Hero

Desdemona

Hermione

Note that neither Othello nor Leontes has a mentor comparable to Claudio's
Don Pedro. Don Pedro talked with Hero's father, Leonato, and arranged the
marriage. Othello obviously arranged his own marriage to Desdemona, whose
father didn't even know about the marriage. Othello has thus absorbed the
mentor's function. We know nothing about how Leontes managed his marriage
to Hermione, but he doesn't have anyone associated with him who could be
called his mentor. Further, there is no deceiver in The Winter's Tale
comparable to Don John or Iago. Leontes deceives himself; he has thus
absorbed the function of deceiver into himself. Iago, Othello's deceiver,
is closer to Othello than Don John is to Claudio. And, finally, among the
presumed paramours, Cassio is closer to Othello than Borachio is to Claudio.
And Polixenes and Leontes have known one another since boyhood; they are
so closely identified that we can consider them doubles.

Thus relationships between key characters and the protagonist become more
intimate as we move from the comedy to the tragedy to the romance--and
some characters, mentor and deceiver, seem to disappear, their functions
being absorbed into the protagonist. Finally, note that the protagonist
becomes more powerful as we move through the sequence of plays. Claudio
is a youth just beginning to make his way in the world. Othello is a mature
man, a seasoned general at the height of his career; but there are men
who have authority over him. Leontes is king (and father); there is no
mundane authority higher than his. Perhaps this increase in power is correlated
with the absorption of functions into the protagonist. The absorption of
functions increases the behavioral range of the protagonist--the modes
he can enact. And this increased range is symbolized by higher social status.

The changes as we move from play to play in the order Shakespeare wrote
them are mutually consistent. Whatever it means to talk about a vector
in an abstract space of modal dispositions, this pattern is an example.
Note that this Shakespearean trajectory is about what happened in Shakespeare's
mind over two decades. The changes which happen to imaginary characters
in plays and novels are, of course, imaginary. But these changes are empathetically
enacted by real people, readers and audience, over the course of hours
or days. The reorganizational effect of Rank 3 literature happens on this
time scale; but repeated exposure to such literature over decades may well
produce the kinds of change I've noted in Shakespeare's dramatic career
(see note 13 below).

Finally, some methodological comments. One, I note that the method of comparison
I used in these Shakespeare plays is essentially the same as the method
I use in the larger evolutionary context where we follow Hamlet from Saxo
Grammaticus to Shakespeare and then the two-phase romance from Shakespeare
to Jane Austen. If Shakespeare's career is moving in a space of modal dispositions,
the larger movement occurs in a different space, one even deeper and stranger.
That is the space of expressive evolution, which Hays (1992, p. 196) has
characterized as involving the differentiation of cortical modes.
Second, while I find it convenient to use the metaphor of a mathematical
space, I have no reason to believe that, when these ideas are worked out
in more detail, that the notion of an abstract space will remain useful.
Maybe it will, maybe not. A measure of skepticism is in order lest such
a metaphor take on a life of its own.

12. In dealing with the novel, recent literary theorists
have found the Formalist distinction between story and plot insufficient.
We need something like Gérard Gennette's trichotomy of récit
, which is the narrative text itself, and which can, in this particular
trichotomy, perform the conceptual labor the Formalists assign to plot,
histoire , which is roughly equivalent to the Formalist's notion
of story, and narration , " the act of narrative production
and, by extension, the real or fictional situation in which it takes place,"
(Rimmon 1976: 40 - 41). It is control over this last element of the trichotomy
which is so highly developed in the novel; this is where the narrator fits
in. Although I have little experience with this particular conceptual scheme
and so am reluctant to say much, it does suggest a parallel to my analysis
of musical evolution in terms of differentiation and control over rhythm,
melody, and harmony (Benzon, forthcoming). Rank 1 narrative has control
over histoire . With Rank 2, histoire and récit
are differentiated and controlled independently. At Rank 3 narration
is further differentiated out and the artist gains independent control
over it.

13. One piece of evidence in favor of the reorganizational
nature of Rank 3 psychic life can be found in George Valliant's longitudinal
(1977) study of Harvard graduates. He found that, over the long-term, over
decades, these men shifted from less to more mature defense mechanisms.
That is what you would expect of a personality structure capable of long-term
reorganization. Harvard graduates are not, of course, representative of
the United States population at large; but then only a portion of that
population is likely to be Rank 3 (Benzon and Hays, 1990. p. 304). But,
if there is any institution which is designed to produce Rank 3 people,
it is the first-class liberal arts undergraduate school, of which Harvard
is an example.

14. This speculation is too delicious to resist.
Recent neuropsychological research indicates that the functional mapping
of the neocortex can change over the course of weeks (Calvin, 1989, pp.
175-175; Barinaga, 1992). In a typical experiment a monkey is trained repeatedly
to use a particular finger, with the result that the area of the neocortex
devoted to that finger grows. There is nothing special about this particular
area of the neocortex. The basic units of neural circuitry are much the
same throughout the cortex (Mountcastle, 1978). Thus an effect like this
is likely to obtain in all regions. If it is just a matter of repeated
use, it would seem that we could get a similar effect from exercising a
considerably more sophisticated task, such as intellectual creation. The
more sophisticated task no doubt involves many cortical areas so that the
reorganization would be more global; and such a global reorganization might
well support a new behavioral modes. Thus the modal repertoire of a person
might not be permanently fixed. The repertoire could change, perhaps even
vary with the seasons, as an individual's daily routine changes. If that
change is relatively small, then the current set of modes might "stretch"
to accommodate. Where the change is great, it might be more efficient to
reallocate cortical resources to support modes more appropriate to the
new activities.

Booth, W. C. (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.

Calvin, W. H. (1989)The Cerebral Symphony. New York:
Bantam Books.

Clynes, M. (1977) Sentics . New York: Anchor Press.

Derrida, J. (1970) "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences." in Macksey, R. and Donato, E. eds. The Languages
of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy
. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1974) Love and Hate . New York: Schocken Books.
Fiedler, L. (1966) Love and Death in the American Novel . Revised
Edition, New York: Stein and Day.

The earliest seeds of these ideas came in undergraduate courses taught
by Richard Macksey, Mary Ainsworth, Donald Howard, Neville Dyson-Hudson,
and Arthur Stinchcombe. The first explicit formulation came in a research
group presided over by David Hays and including David Bloom, William Doyle,
Rhoda Fletcher, Richard Fritzson, and Revere Perkins. The written result
appeared in a dissertation directed by Jim Bunn, with Bruce Jackson, Irving
Massey, and David Hays serving as readers. Hays and I have continued to
collaborate over the years; he kindly read drafts as I produced them. A
comment by Martha Mills forced a more interesting conclusion. David Porush
laughed at my jokes. Errors and outrages remain mine.